Fedora 11 is the buggiest of the Fedora clan but it doesn’t mean it’s bad. As my opinion it’s the best Linux Distro… Most of these bugs were due to the fact that I have out-dated hardware!

My fedora 11 Gnome desktop ... Nothing new fron FC9

I have mentioned why I decided to upgrade from fedora 9 to 11 in my previous blog article. So here I’m almost after a week ……. wonder what happened? I was fighting the bugs which were found to be ultimate challenge and test of stamina after I started using Linux. For 3 days, I was hopeless as I was unable to see even the desktop! But problems did not end there for me… There are still some unsolved mysteries even with after upgrading bug-fixes. You should understand that I’m kind of addicted to Fedora, so whatever happens I would be using her just hoping that bug-fixes will arrive in time, and the next Fedora 12 would be somthing brilliant like Fedora 9. (Still, i think Fedora is the best as it comes with cutting-edge tech which is why actually these bugs come)

On last Saturday, after writing my previous blog, I first decided to upgrade from version 9 to 11. I saw the warnings on others who tried it, but as I have upgraded 7,8 to 9 it didn’t come new to me. So I upgraded which took 4 hours, and when restarted it shows GRUB all over the screen where GRUB should be loading. Like this:

GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB

So I boot Fedora11 with rescue mode and typed

chroot /mnt/sysimage ‘changing root path to FC11 root

and i opened grub.conf file in /etc and it appeared good, it shows that it had identified the windows OS, and had pointed to correct paths. No problem.

The /boot/grub/device.map file was correct, which says which hard drive is sda and sdb. The file looks like this:

So i reinstalled grub with grub-install sdb (as my linux installation was in 2nd hard drive) but didn’t work, but doing

grub-install -–force-lba sdb

did work. Error found to be something to do with the AWARD bios and grub.

So I came to the fedora 11, but upgrade has been buggy. So buggy that it crashes every time. With no choice, I decided to back-up my data and do a fresh install.

So I did the fresh-install using “use entire drive” option, and without changing any details as a beginner would do. When installation was complete, I saw “Error 22” instead of grub upon rebooting. It means that system cannot find the bootloader, which is GRUB. I looked at the files and it seemed like system has detected the drives in wrong #’s. So I did grub-install again, with –recheck and -–force-lba which didn’t work.

So I decide to install again, this time using custom settings for partitions. I used Ext3 for / partition where Ext4 was the default. This did work, finally. Finally I was able to run fedora11. The problem was that the GRUB still cannot identify Ext4 file system, and it gives errors in some systems.

So here I see the desktop, but wrong resolution. So i typed system-config-display on the terminal… but there was no such command! You do have a “Display” applet on System>Prefrences but it couldn’t even get my monitor type. So I installed system-config-display by,

yum install system-config-display

I was soon to find out that i’m becoming a yum addict. This is because programs which used to compile well on FC9, ends up on errors (C syntax errors – you can’t solve those) particularly due to version incompitabilty of GCC and Cmake etc… So a person who haven’t used yum before (me) started doing everything by it!

Upon installing mplayer – my favourite player, I found out that it crashes everytime I open a video! Damn— It did superbly on FC9! Unable to figure out why, I was shocked that even the vlc played buggy and totem too did the same! By this time I knew something was wrong with multimedia drivers — but later found out that it’s a bug of PulseAudio — and again updating didn’t help. Changing to ALSA and OSS didn’t help as they seem “deactivated” although everything I could find on these have been installed.

Anyway, I could get mplayer to run by changing the video output driver from Xvideo to opengl. But it doesn’t give the previous quality. But still up to now, i can’t hear any sound at lmms,hydrogen, audacity and record-sound.

Finally trying to print by IT degree notes I plugged in my HP P1005 laserjet. I saw an improvement than in FC9, it automatically installed driver and software for the printer! But when I sent a document to print… nothing happened.. It says “your printer may not be connected” … what the HELL? I checked the installed drivers and they were 100% correct. I guess this is a bug in new hplip 3 or cups. Still not solved. Printer did well in FC9 where I manually installed hplip 2.8.

Malshan Peirissaid,

I really hope the same miracle would happen with the upcoming fedora 12 too…. (usually they put something superb after a buggy version)
Anyway, the bugs i’m getting are mostly due to out-dated hardware…. people may get a whole different picture if they run FC11 in a new machine.

JimmyPsaid,

Accept it or not, Fedora has always been buggy. Sometimes less, sometimes more. It’s a play-thing, not a work-thing. If you care for cutting edge, go with Sidux, and if you love stability run Debian Stable.

Katrina Paynesaid,

This was a blast in the past. Found your blog while trying to find animation software in the Fedora repository systems. I jumped over onto page 2 of your archives (thanks to the Moonlight 3d entry)… Google kind of spidered your website oddly.

Anyways on your list of bugs:

The issues with cmake, gcc and glib weirdness:
Having jumped onto a few different distros and Unix workalikes before I showed up at Fedora for F9 (the list includes, in chronological order, Red Hat Linux 5.0, RHL7.2, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Debian, Knoppix, Gentoo, Ubuntu, DragonflyBSD, Solaris and ArchLinux), those compilers issues is not Fedora territory alone.

These issues is why Fedora started to be a bit more heavy handed in enforcing “the Fedora Mentality”… which when followed (I do not do it well), typically allows for a much stabler system, that does not get completely impossible to maintain after a while. You can still compile your applications, it is just suggested you use Yum to make them into a temporary package so that even after they are installed, you can pull them from your system in a much saner easier to recall manner.

The issues with Pulse Audio:
I suggest everybody here announce very loudly they want to make a new sound system standard for Linux. As ESD, ALSA, Artsd, OSS and Pulse are not enough. Mention the usual reasons they gave for any of these… and give them your name, age, address, GPS updates (so they can follow you) and access codes to at least three missile systems you are in range of getting struck by. That was the issue with Pulse… one that ticks off a lot of kernel developers.

Those “installed files” for OSS and ALSA likely were just handles to send that stuff through Pulse. By pretending to be OSS and ALSA for all purposes and intentions that program really needs to give a crap about.

The issues with XVideo:
XVideo libraries have stopped appearing in Fedora from F12. Further more–it looks like XVideo is not something that x.org really deals with.

It looks like the X.Org project has systematically started going through everything everybody hated about XFree86… and started to not do that stuff. XVideo appears to be one of the many glitchy Shared Libraries that XFree86 used regulary… that programs that were not XFree86 and shouldn’t touch it, were also using it.

Typically the only thing that should touch XVideo is the XLib stuff itself… X.org kind of notice this was not enforced… and X.org has been working to remove XFree86’s retardation from X11. We’ll probably see a rather wicked awesome version of X.org realised before it looks like X12 is being drafted (its long over due).

Issues with mplayer:
That is more an issue with Pulse Audio. Getting Pulse Audio to run… and interact with mplayer would solve that (getting everybody to just understand you only really need OSSv4 would be a better one… but… most people ignore artsd, esd, pulse and alsa really add nothing that OSSv4 doesn’t already provide for the Sound Hardware).

Boot errors on ext3/ext4:
Also, if your boot partition is too small, Fedora will not install onto it. Which if your HD is encrypted from a previous Fedora version–and the minimum size on a prior upgrade… you are going to have issues.

Fedora really needs to add a button, “shrink LVM to allow for more /boot space”, that doesn’t require too much messing with LVM–without messing too much with what is in LVM.

-=-

How Fedora has been handling putting out bleeding edge software in its Distro has been fairly well handled. Jump over to the Fedora Documentation projects, you’ll note they do require a certain level of stability for release (usually 89% stable) to meet their release cycle. Rather than say… emulate the FreeBSD release cycle. A new FreeBSD released every six months… but delayed for four months to get it just right.

They need to work in a way that I can download an “update version F16-F17” tool. Run it while my system is still more or less kind of up–then reboot into the updated Fedora and run a few minor stuff. Well, make that download not a completely glitchy pile of turd. The people who do use that tell others not too (they are still working on it).

Yes–the “follow the Fedora mindset” has been getting rather heavy handed in its application. To the point they need to have it known a bit more, “RTFM, guys… just… RTFM… I needed to do that–and now I am awesome” going around.

The manual is well written, and when the mindset is explained… it is hard to disagree with it. It includes silly things like, “any patches the Distro makes in the period of packaging stuff, is sent upstream to the developers of the software”, “try to avoid having multiple repositories (usually, you just need Fedora, RPMFusion and Adobe)”, “have all our legally risque ones in RPMFusion”, “try to put stuff that follows software standards in our releases–potentially breaking software that isn’t doing what it should (mplayer, Skype and others)”, “give our users SELinux profiles that let them know when stuff is happening… and a few times it is not (this was how I caught my XVideo errors… I compiled my own XVideo… and SELinux blocked anything from using my compiled XVideo.so)” and a lot of other stuff.

If anything, we need more people going, “Fedora is awesome… but they kind of make you have to read the release notes. When I don’t, I’m all scratching my head and just as confused as you.”

-=-

Anyways, thanks for the blast from the past… putting this reply here, because well–guessing most people here know this stuff… but well, DaveCoder86 knew something. WHAT THE HECK DID YOU SEE!? WHAT DID YOU LEARN IN 2003~!? (sorry… it is dated 2009… and 2009 will become that 2003 of that XKCD comic)

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